Clairvoyants are having a surge in popularity, but are they for real or can anyone master the art of truth telling? We challenged Anita Bhagwandas to get in touch with her psychic side

Photography: Sarah Brown

It’s 6pm and I’ve been sat in front of a deck of tarot cards for 45 minutes. My eyes are closed – to connect to the Angels – and I really feel like they’re trying to tell me something. Although I’m not sure what exactly. And seeing as I did once come home so wasted that I was convinced our boiler was talking to me, I could quite easily be wrong.

I’ve just finished the final task in an online course which promised to teach me the finer aspects of tarot reading in a mere day. In fact, over the last month I’ve spent 124 hours trying to hone my psychic skills in a bid to discover if you’re born with the ability to ‘connect to the spirits’ or whether – as many suspect – it’s a melange of guesses, luck and deception.

Interest in psychics is at an all-time high. From embellished tarot prints on the catwalk at Dior, to the Psychic Sisters’ outrageously popular fortune-telling outpost at Selfridges (the Kardashians are fans), the practice has made its way firmly into the cultural zeitgeist. In fact, half the UK population say they believe in psychic ability, and a third of us admit we have sought advice from a psychic at some point in our lives. It’s not just the stereotypical older women with 67 cats who are fans, either. As Gordon Smith, medium and author, explains: “More and more people – especially those in their 20s and 30s – are becoming involved in spirituality [seeking the services of mediums and clairvoyants]. There’s been a huge shift in the last few years.”

Some might say it’s the life stage we’re at – society expects so much of women in their 30s (marriage, babies, suburban home, to list a few more traditional expectations) and if we don’t measure up, it’s easy to feel lacking. So perhaps it’s no surprise that we seek a little reassurance that everything will eventually come good. We do know that, statistically, people are more likely to consult horoscopes and psychics when times are tough.

“As well as personal concerns, when there is more widespread financial or political uncertainty, seeing a psychic would seem to provide us with an individual reassurance – or at the very least some insight into our future – when we have even less control of the bigger picture,” explains psychologist Jo Hemmings.

Of course, things have been consistently crap for millennials for a while. We came of age in the last recession, we’ll be renting until we’re 100 and now Brexit’s adding to the sense of unease gripping the nation – so really, we just need to find some stability somewhere.

Can you learn to be psychic? Stylist discovers how easy it is to tell someone’s fortune